Chris lives here.: March 6

The past few weeks have been pretty busy and full on, resulting in me not posting as much as i would like - apologies. So where to start.. Boyne Smelters would be a good start. Right. So Gladstone as many people know is a highly industrious town - boys town really. Big cars, big trucks, big buildings and big pay salaries to some of those workers. Jealous would be an understatement, I wish I made 100-200k a year.. but that's another story.

So BSL (Boyne Smelters Limited) have made this new 'baker' essentially where they bake.. some sort of mineral, to make.. some sort of product.. I really don't know, I should perhaps start taking more note of what I shoot.

But it's pretty cool. The whole place is like 150m long with millions upon millions of dollars worth of equipment. This is one of their new high tech cranes that can move along the whole production line and pickup or drop things as it pleases.

So as you can see it goes a pretty long way back. They basically bake this stuff that looks like gunpowder.. what they do with it i have no idea but apparently it's a pretty big thing around here. If you have time go and google BSL and you can find out what they do and tell me.

I was sent to cover Autofest which was really really good fun! I'd never been to anything like this before and I must admit, I got a bit of a kick seeing all the hotted up cars, doing donuts, burnouts, dragging etc. I shot the absolute shit out of Autofest so there are way too many photos to go through to find a couple of pics to put on here. Sorry. However they had motorbikes that were doing awesome aerials which was probably the favourite thing for me at Autofest.

It was a bit of a challenge to try and frame these guys properly when they're flying through the air at 60-80 some km/s and i have a 200mm attached to my camera. Every minuscule movement from me or the riders equates to massive shifts in focus and framing when looking down a 200mm lens. Luckily for me they were doing this for a good 15-20mins so I had time to get the safe shots as well as a few creatives.

For some reason this is my favourite shot of the 3. Yeah ok, i know in the other ones they're doing cool tricks, plus the framing is nice and tight, but i'm drawn to this image of seeing this, lets be frank, crazy mother f*cker flying through the air on his bike, risking his life, just to impress a few people. totally bizarre. But i like this shot. Him being backdropped by the clouds instead of the blue sky makes a big difference too. - Total fluke on my behalf.

From one extreme to another. I shoot chess. The Gladstone Chess club was running a tournament last weekend with a surprisingly good turnout - about 20. The kids basically had 9 rounds to get through and the one with the most points at the end wins. Simple, unlike chess. These kids were absolute chess whizzes. I thought I knew how to play chess, but after seeing these guys play I realised I have no idea whatsoever. Has anyone heard of 'Speed Chess'? I didn't know what the f*ck was going on, but all the kids were raving about it and squealing with excitement and joy when they played it, as if they had gotten a new puppy for Christmas.

So that photo. I had taken enough shots of kids playing I wanted something a little more documentary and added shots of the kids slamming down the timer whilst playing. Good ole' 16-35mm.

Won't lie. Shooting chess was actually pretty fun. After shooting cricket, football (rugby) - it's not football. No flippin' idea why they call Rugby football when they hardly even use their feet. Anyway, drifting off the subject, but yeah, after shooting all those sports it's always nice to have something different and a way you can try and make it look interesting and better than what it really is. Yeah, that's right, photos lie. The beauty about situations like this is that I have time to really focus on emotions, movements, really subtle things that people may or may not normally see or think about when they think of chess.

Not too much to say about this. They had motorbike racing at the race track and I wanted to focus more on the rider instead of the background. slowed the shutter down to about 1/30th to get enough of the background blurred out and panned with the rider to try and keep him sharp. I always like doing a few of these shots in these kinds of shoots just to keep things different, cos all racing photos look the same - unless people crash of course.

Speaking about doing things different, this is a pretty good example of having the time time to play around with creativity to get some pretty nice shots in what is normally a pretty boring event. About the event, it was the Roller Disco at the PCYC - don't ask me what it stands for, but it's basically just a large indoor stadium and the kids in there had a disco, cool music, rollerskating, you get the jist.

What I really like most about this shot is the lighting in particular. The disco was dark, like.. no lights dark, which I thought was stupid, didn't even have a disco ball with fancy trippy lights going off, none of that, which made shooting in these conditions really challenging. I had already gotten a few close up panning shots of the kids with the 16-35mm where I just got up nice and close to them while they were skating, shot them in the face with the flash and panned with them to get a nice blurry background. I had enough of that and I knew I wanted to isolate a few kids instead of having super wide shots. It would've looked nice if there were lots of kids in there, but having one kid, small in the frame looks boring, so shooting long is a nice way to isolate as well as fill up the frame. I tried shooting without flash with the 70-200mm f2.8, but I was limited by the amount of light in there - nil - and my ISO was already at 51000 with a 1/50th shutter speed, which is not a good thing when you want to freeze motion. My solution, shoot with flash but off camera to get nice dramatic lighting instead of flashing them right in the face. I basically commandeered a table that was lying around, set up to of my flashes on there and waited for people to skate close enough and them shoot away. The technique worked pretty well, but since it was so dark in there, I needed to drag the shutter long enough to absorb enough ambient light, but not so long that the subjects would start to blur. Flash freezes subjects, but at 1/30th its pushing it. I didn't want the ISO too high cos I wanted the images to be relatively clean still. Anyway, back to the image. haha, these girls happened to luckily (for me) fall over right infront of my lights which resulted in a really nice photo i think. The person riding past on the left - total fluke and actually i'm bloody lucky she didn't block my shot, or i'd've been pissed!

Gotta love when you do your job too well. The story was about the long grass at the local dog park. Essentially people have been complaining that the grass is too long and there is potential of snakes, etc in there, since they like to hide in the grass. Apparently I made this look too nice and not ugly enough, haha gotta love it. One of my friends Megan said it reminded her of pedigree ads and wanted to buy dog food. Win?

ps. working with animals. total nightmare.. same with kids..

Like this one.. The Gladstone Hospital has been getting some pretty bad press lately, so we had a good news story about the hospital, instead of one about them causing miscarriages, partial paralysis etc.. bad stuff to say the least. This guy apparently nearly died and the hospital saved his like... I thought that their job description was to save people already, but apparently this story is extra special? nfi. Kid was an absolute tear away, would not sit still for 30 seconds to get a damn shot in! this shot is him running around, tearing the slide off the little fort behind him, but thanks to the magic of photography, it look like he's smiling/laughing having a good time. lies lies lies.. haters gonna hate right.

I'm going through another one of my fads and I really like portraits where they aren't looking at me.. It reminds me more of Nat Geo stuff, more candid style photos. Here are a few examples of such, and also she's the one who was partially paralysed due to the Hospital..

In hindsight I think I actually lit this image too well. I would like less light in the back to create a darker moodier shot. So anyway, like I mentioned, you can see these last few shots have been them not looking at me. The kid doesn't count, but I have one of him and his mum both not looking at me and doing their own thing. I've come to the self assumption that there are a few benefits to shooting like this. 1) they look a heck of a lot more natural, as if i'm in their life in their day to day living, and 2) it makes it less awkward for the subjects as even though as silly as it sounds, looking away makes them feel a lot easier having a big camera shoved in their face. Lets see how long I can keep this style going.

Clean Up Australia Day. before you say anything, this is NOT staged. The cup really was sitting there.

I know this has been a pretty long blog post, sorry about that, but i'll finish off with some sport, as usual.

Really bloody cute kid. Love his enthusiasm and his footy attire. I'm annoyed a chopped his feet off.. sigh.

Softball semi finals with my new, old 300mm f4. I'll add lots more photos from this lens when I run it through some more tests. so far so good, but at night time.. mreh.. bit sluggish. I should've pushed the ISO higher in this shot to get a faster shutter speed, but you learn from it.

And finally, the first time I got a shot of the wickets being broken! I was actually very very lucky to get this shot. We (reporter and I) had literally walked onto the ground, and I luckily had the camera to my eye while walking over there and machine gunned it as the bowler came in and was lucky enough to get this shot. =D

Ok. Sorry about the long post but it's been a while. Hope you enjoyed it!

Ciao.

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

March 6 - Image heavy

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